Pragmatic Fuzzy Research

Pragmatic fuzziness (PF in short) is a special language phenomena as well as a communicative strategy that refers to the deliberate use of fuzzy or equivocal language in verbal interaction. As we know, our daily communication is full of pragmatic fuzziness, and the deliberate use of fuzzy language is so prevalent in our daily conversation that people just regard it as "part of our taken-for-granted world". At home and abroad, most scholars and linguists tend to discover the functions or rhetorical effects of fuzziness in specific registers such as forensic documents, advertisement, literature, etc. As for another heartedly discussed question of how to interpret fuzziness from pragmatic point of view, most of the researchers, from a static but not dynamic perspective, pay attention to Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle. In this paper, we make an attempt to study PF-the deliberate use of fuzzy language as a strategy in verbal communication, mainly under the instruction of a newly-born theory in the field of pragmatics -Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory(LAT in short). From a dynamic angle, we make a comparatively comprehensive and step-by-step analysis on major linguistic devoices involved in PF, theoretical base for PF and effects & functions of PF, as well as with the help from Conversational Implicature, Cooperative Principle, and Politeness Principle to Face Theory, Relevance Theory and Linguistic Adaptation Theory.There are six parts in this paper. It begins with a general introduction to recent researches' limitation and the necessity for this paper. In chapter two, we introduce and clarify some related theoretical viewpoints and concepts. In...